The University of Colorado at Boulder received $256.5 million in sponsored research awards for the 2006 fiscal year, nearly two-thirds of it from four of the largest federal agencies. As in recent years, CU-Boulder’s leading funding agencies for 2006 were NASA ($48.9 million), the Department of Health and Human Services ($43 million), the National Science Foundation ($39.7 million) and the Department of Commerce ($31.9 million). In addition, CU-Boulder was awarded $3.4 million in federal funds for space research from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena and the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, said Randall Draper, director of the CU-Boulder Office of Contracts and Grants. The 2006 total for the campus is down less than 1 percent from the 2005 total of $257.6 million, reflecting a trend in recent years of tight federal funding. CU-Boulder received a record $259.7 million in sponsored research funding in 2004 and first topped the $200 million mark in 1999.

CU-Boulder also received $13.3 million from the Department of Defense, $7.4 million from the Department of Energy, $5.1 million from the Department of Education and $1.8 million from the Department of the Interior in 2006, Draper said. CU-Boulder also received about $15.7 million from industry, $9.6 million from the state of Colorado and $21.9 million from other universities in 2006.

Campus-based research institutes and the Graduate School received about $144.7 million of the sponsored research funding to CU-Boulder for 2006, led by the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics with $42.7 million and the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences with $40.5 million. CIRES is a joint institute of CU-Boulder and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Federal research and development funding for universities has remained relatively flat for the past several years, while institutional competition for those dollars is increasing nationwide, said Draper. On the positive side, collaborative institutes at CU-Boulder continue to do well, he said.